About VoilaDesign

Welcome to Hélène ‘s studio

Hélène started her Art Studio Voiladesign over 25 years ago during a fulfilling career as a professional in arts education and as a mixed media artist. Growing up in Quebec City and surrounded by a strong arts community, Hélène expressed her love for the arts early in her life more particularly through her sketches and drawings in fashion and interior home designs and her interests in architecture, film and photography. This encouraged her further to develop her artistic talent through her academic studies in Fine Arts and education. Her dream for designing her home and her first art Studio became a reality and a place of inspirations where she found enjoyment developing new ideas, marketing her artwork and exploring her creativity more in depth.

How it all started

After completing her university studies in Fine Arts and Education, Hélène pursued her passion by teaching in an International Baccalaureate (IB) High School, teaching various levels of the Visual Arts Curriculum for the Fine Arts department in both French and English. After advising friends and family through numerous renovations, restorations, and redesigns, her life-long interest in creative expressions through art, has led her to home staging.

Voiladesign Today

Hélène enjoys managing her workplace comprised of her art projects in her Studio along with her Gallery Voiladesign and Home Staging business. This allows her to team up with her life partner Glenn Szabo, a realtor in the Okanagan Real Estate market. Her artistic talent and creative solutions are a perfect match with Glenn’s expertise in real estate; both ensuring that their clients’ homes leave a lasting impression with potential homebuyers!

Where to find

Throughout her career, Hélène’s artwork has appeared in several art shows, exhibitions, juried shows as well as various publications and visual art resources. Currently her work can be found at the Vernon Public Art Gallery and in several other galleries and shows around BC. Her home studio based gallery also offers an opportunity to see some of her art pieces in progress, and is where her most recent work can be purchased.

A letter from the artist

As a versatile artist, I like working with different art forms. I consider it very liberating to explore my ideas through a wide range of materials, techniques of design and processes. My camera follows me everywhere as my photographs are inspirational and are often used to be transformed into my paintings. My work is personal and referential to nature and human experiences, precisely relating to romance, the seriousness and humor found in events, places and small moments in life that we tend to overlook. l enjoy designing images around messages that awake a sense of wonder.

When I am planning a redesign or staging a home, Minimalism and Zen come to mind as I aim to create calming and serene interiors with a sense of space. Both aesthetics translate into a clutter free home where removing what is meaningless is essential. My strong connection to earth influences me to express the delicate beauty and architecture found in the natural world and for my love for the wildlife more particularly from birds’ behavior patterns. This is reflected through the use of natural elements in my work and through my observations describing plants, unexpected designs found in places, repeated patterns of things seen in detail.

The creative process offers endless possibilities. I enjoy the creation, the making, the brainstorming, the discovering, the ideation and the unpredictable when creation is in full action. I like using a combination of raw elements with unexpected materials. Those are all the things that intrigue and fascinate me! I often use an abstract approach to express my thoughts and emotions using storytelling, lyrical phrases, reflections, digital images, found objects and memory as a starting point. Combining printmaking techniques with altered textiles, papers and mixed media is fascinating. Ceramics process and soft slabs of clay to transform shapes is fulfilling. Painting on canvas with sculptural materials and creating eye-catching textures, layers upon layers of bee’s wax and oil mixed with pigments are exciting. Finding pure beauty in nature and natural resources, gemstones, wood and glimmering metals inspires me to play with light and movement, form, texture and color.

Working in my studio is a journey filled with emotion, exploration and discovery where pushing the limits of art media and surfaces are infinite. Nature never stops doing her dance around me. I know that inspiration is never far away to spark my imagination and creativity.